The new issue of The Road Not Taken, a Journal of Formal Poetry has just published one of my sonnets, “Spreading Wings.” You canhttp://journalformalpoetry.com, then click on the Spring 2016 issue and scroll down. Since both of our daughters, Sonja and Mary, were present at the poetry reading at the Reader’s Loft Bookstore in Green Bay (http://www.houseofthetomato.com/march), I read this Italian sonnet there. The sonnet is about them when they were young. I wrote it during an extremely terrifying time in Ethel’s and my life when Kevin, our 27 year old son, was in the process of dying from cancer. Writing sonnets (I wrote 44 in all) was the only way I could bear what Ethel, I, and, of course, Kevin most of all, were going through. What concerned me day after day was our family and remembering incidents that made up the substance of our lives as a family. This sonnet tells of a time that I remember with great love in my spirit.
Raising children is not always easy, but I like to think that at least part of what Ethel and I have achieved in life is the way our two daughters have reflected into our granddaughters and grandsons. They both are beyond outstanding parents, always willing to sacrifice so that their children can meet whatever promise they have in life. I am also convince that they are great teachers because of the spirit they have inculcated from the time they were toddlers, dancing through life with a verve that gives no quarter to a universe that is not always kind.
I hope those of you who go to read the sonnet will enjoy it.

On Friday nights I’d work all day, then walk
home from the office where two teenaged girls
were streaming past their mother with their talk
about this boy, this girl, their endless whirl
of friend, near-friend relationships that bloomed
and changed like clothing changed from day to day.

The minute that I touched the door excitement spumed
as I gulped down a meal before Green Bay—
and then we drove for forty country miles
to where two girls could dance and laugh to songs
and show that small town girls had mastered styles
that big town girls would envy all night long.

I sat inside a dinghy Burger King
and read while daughters spread their teen club wings.

She stands inside the garden’s blooming, still
As long green stalks that reach toward the sun.
Above her head the Arcosanti bell,
A gift brought to her by her lovely son,
Waits wind to stir its deep, pure voice to song.
Her graying hair shines in the early morning light:
A silent testament to births and how
Her son died in a place she did not understand
And how her daughters have a boundless grace
And how granddaughters gleam and grandsons spark,
One caught inside autism’s draining clinch—
A binding to the yellows, blues, and pinks
Of blooms she planted in the early spring

Then, whirring, one bold calliope bees
Up to the bright red feeder near her eyes
And slips its slender beak into the hole
Where nectar made inside her kitchen sink
Transmutes into an iridescent energy.
A moment more and clouds of hummingbirds
Kaleidoscope around her head; her eyes
And spirit swirled into a halo born
Of flowers, bell, the hummingbirds, the light
Of early morning, all the life she’s lived.

What does it mean deep down, beneath all feelings,
all thought, the regularity of breath,
to have a son? Blood from your blood, the singing
as steady as your heartbeat, the length and breadth
of who you are as father, husband, man,
the meaning borne from father, mother, son
passed through to son and daughters, all the hands
humanity has known on days with blazing suns.
We ought to celebrate and really know
each moment when our voices weave a song
as powerful as any oratorio
that makes the love we feel forever strong.

I think about my son, his spirit’s gentleness,
his signature of passionate intelligence.

Three children, daughters and a son, each one
so precious that they sang alive our days,
extending who we were into a sun-
filled destiny where joy and love and praise
would always spin out like a spool of string
into the future where we’d live in glory.

So many memories: The girls on swings,
our son enraptured by a funny story,
the kind of living fashioned from the touch
of life on life, from parents into child,
the common daily motions that are such
a part of who we humans are, selves tiled

As tiny, delicate as butterflies,
she sleeps inside the tent they’ve put her in.
Too young for whooping cough, her breathing, cries,
are fluttering, her living stretching thin
across the fact that she’s too young, too new
to face what is a harsh reality.
A second daughter, miracle so true
she opens up a universe to be.
Her mother spends a night, two nights, tense hours
of waiting, waiting for her breath to clear.

When those you love are threatened, all the towers
of hope constructed when you’re free of fear

are held suspended, waiting for the charm
of holding one small baby in your arms.

24

To Sonja

As beautiful as autumn maple leaves,
Vesuvius fires locked deep inside her bones,
she finds the strength to face her trials and weave
a rising from the place where she’s been thrown.
Sometimes her fires stir up a sweeping wind
that uproots trees and changes what has been,
but through the storms of life she keeps her friends
and throws her stress into a rubbish bin.
First born, her independence drove us wild
when hormones had her stretch her fledgling wings.
We wanted family, but in this shining child
we had a bird who wanted songs she made to sing.

And now she has a husband, two young sons,
A woman walking proudly in the sun.